Big Tech looks the other way on Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses
DOES SAUDI REPRESSION MATTER TO BIG TECH?
A young woman in Saudi Arabia is in jail for using Twitter and Snapchat to advocate for an end to the country’s male guardianship rules and for failing to wear “decent” clothes. It came to light last month that Manahel al-Otaibi, 29, has been in pre-trial detention since November 2022. But as is too often the case with Saudi Arabia, it took months for the story to reach international media, and publicly available details on al-Otaibi’s case remain scarce. And since details from court proceedings are almost never made public in Saudi Arabia, we can only speculate about what evidence will actually be brought against al-Otaibi. But it is conceivable that prosecutors will ask one or both companies to hand over her private data — a standard move in cases like these.
What kind of data might the Saudi government expect companies to hand over? The answer to that question may be up in the air, on account of the fact that some of the biggest U.S.-based tech companies have drastically increased their presence in Saudi Arabia in recent years. Last month, Microsoft announced plans to establish a cloud computing center there, a move that was swiftly condemned by advocates in the Gulf region. And Microsoft is late to the party — in 2018, just a few months after Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered and dismembered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Google signed a memorandum of understanding with Saudi Aramco, the state oil giant, to build a “cloud region” on Saudi soil. The deal became public in 2020, in a rather vanilla blog post touting the benefits of cloud infrastructure for enterprise.
When advocacy groups asked what the cloud region would mean for people’s data and privacy in the region, Google responded with a mostly boilerplate letter, in which it offered only this assurance: “An independent human rights assessment was conducted for the Google Cloud Region in Saudi Arabia, and Google took steps to address matters identified as part of that review.”
Did Google really identify human rights-related “matters” that were so uninteresting that it wasn’t worth saying what the heck they found? This is Saudi Arabia after all.